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Wireless, GPS-Loaded 'Bait Car' Traps Thieves
captainClassLoader writes: "The Washington Post is reporting that a late-model car, loaded with wireless surveillance gear, a remote kill switch and GPS, is being left (unlocked, presumably) on the streets of the Washington, D.C. metro area as 'bait' for car thieves. This article reports that they've just made their first bust with the vehicle."
Who pays the parking tickets on these?
GPS: "Help! I'm being towed!"
This
Now I'm only waiting for the bicycle version. I lose at least one bike a year in the mean streets and garages of San Francisco.
It catches car thieves, but only car thieves. This is one of the few uses of technology that has zero probability of catching "the wrong guy".
I wonder if this technology would be extended to the private consumer level?
If I weren't nailed to the penis, I'd be pushing up the daisies!
But I'm surprised the headline wasn't: Grand Theft Auto Illegal in Arlington, VA (yro, games)!
sulli
RTFJ.
There is a difference between finding a watch on the street and finding a car on the street.
"Holy cow, look at all the cars people lost in this parking lot!"
--Scott
...and I am driving you to the nearest police station where you will be handed over to the authorities. Thank you and have a nice day!
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
I can already hear the cries of "entrapment" about to spring up all over this article, so I'll point out this definition of entrapment, which would seem to indicate that this method (placing a "bait" car in likely spots) is NOT entrapment. I imagine that a court would actually need to rule on this (IANAL), but it's fairly clear-cut to me. Simply placing a car in an area where it is likely to get stolen would not, to any reasonable person, qualify as "government agents [persuading or talking] the person into committing the crime".
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Cars can't talk.
Why don't they 'salt' a few 1982 Lotus Turbo Esprits? Don't those blow up when you break into them?
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Now thanks to the Wasington Post, I know there are a bunch of cars sitting unlocked, and all I need to do to steal them is bring some radio jamming equipment! Sweet!
There's much worse than that in Death Wish. Bronson walks around with a camera hanging from his shoulder, the target (a pickpocketer) runs from behind him, grabs the camera and keeps running in front of him. Then he gets his BIG GUN and shoots the guy DEAD IN THE BACK! How's that for punishment fitting the crime? I was expecting him to shoot his leg. Note, this is not just "shown", this is ADVERTISED AS THE RIGHT AND HEROIC THING TO DO!
The bait described in the article, on the other hand, is 100% correct and clean. I wish "real" cars had that too.
What do you think a car theif does with a stolen car? They bring it somewhere. And then what happens? Someone else brings it somewhere else. Eventually it winds up in a chop shop. Just as they're getting ready to rip it apart, every link in the chain gets busted.
Then you grab their address books and check out their phone logs and see who they associate with...
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
If I leave a wallet on the sidewalk with bills hanging out and someone picks it up and walks off with it, they've committed no crime. If they walk up to my unlocked car with the keys in it parked legally, they break the law as soon as they open my door. I'm not required by the law to lock it. Temptation isn't entrapment.
Entrapment is my promising to send you pictures of hot chicks, then sending you pictures of little kids, then arresting you for having them. You have been persuaded or coerced into committing a crime, whether you'd have committed it yourself later or not.
I live in NYC and nothing turns my stomach more walking down the sidewalks is seeing a bike chained to a pole stripped everything attached with a bolt. I am an avid cyclist in the city and I would never, ever leave my bike outside because of theft. Cops don't even care. They don't seem to realize that bikes can cost hundred and hundreds of dollars or like my Specialized, thousands. It is a big deal monetarily.
ABC had a 20/20 episode where they had a hidden camera and a bike chained to a post. It took only 5 minutes before the thieves went after it every time they set it up. Typical response of the thief was "Oh, I thought this was my bike. Sorry!", then they would run away.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Minneapolis and a few other cities have had a similar program running very sucessfully here over the last 5 years. I believe a couple of the people who were busted even tried to use the entrapment defense, which was summarily shot down in the courts since no one made them steal the car, or even gave them the idea to.
I can see it now; the car locks itself, then starts driving around in circles while the radio plays a continuous loop of N'Sync at 100 decibels.
Do they really need to say "Wireless"?
Was there a (not-so-successful) previous attempt at this, but with wires coming out of it?
m00.
The police don't only have the function of solving crimes they exist also to deter crime. You don't put more cops on the street so that more criminals get caught so much as you put cops on the street to make criminals think twice about committing that crime. This seems like an excellent deterrent and the article says that car theft has dropped in other places where the bait cars were used. So, yes they spent taxpayer money on this, but I'd rather have my car not stolen in the first place than have the cops find it after its been chopped.
No brain, no pain!
Jail time is only a deterrent if would-be crooks consider it likely they will be caught. The problem with the get-tough-on-crime attitude we've seen is that it's all geared to prosecution, not protection or enforcement. Which is what leads to 3-strike laws which put someone in prison for life for shoplifting, a criminal justice system that has been jailing - even sentencing to death - hundreds of innocent people, yet not making the streets any safer. If a crook faced 90% certainty of facing a reasonable sentence, I believe it would be far better deterrent than 10% certainty of facing a draconian one.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
I think that'd violate the Constitutional restrictions on cruel and unusual punishments.
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All your other exmaples of what you want the cops doing are hard to lump together with car theft. Car theft is a crime that results in a loss to its victim. Drug use and prostitution are somewhat victimless crimes. If you don't have problem with people stealing cars, maybe someone should steal your car? Gun ownership isn't a crime outright, so I don't know where you came up with that one.
How the fuck are you supposed to "protect the citizens" if you can't "hunt down the criminals"?
XML causes global warming.
It's not a GPS-based system. It doesn't even use the cell phone network, relying on its own infrastructure. It's based on car units and direction-finding receivers in police cars. Each car unit has a transmitter and receiver, but doesn't normally transmit. The unit constantly listens for a message on an FM broadcast station subcarrier. On receipt of the proper message, the unit starts transmitting the "I'm stolen" signal, which is received by receivers in police cars. The signal doesn't contain any positional information; somebody has to do the direction-finding job the hard way.
Lojack covers major metropolitan areas in about a dozen states. It requires cooperation from the local cops, so it takes a major marketing and negotiation effort to get it into a city.
You are a dumb ass. Hunting down car thieves lowers the probability that your car will get stolen. Just the fact that it's been done once helps you out. I don't want my tax dollars paying for cops sitting on the road with a radar gun, however I do want them to continue getting real criminals off of the street. Guess what, that's the beauty of the tax system, you can pretend that your money doesn't go to sting operations and I can pretend mine doesn't go to traffic cops.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
What's the point? There are a certain number of people who want to steal cars. Given the choice between: 1) Criminal steal bait car, gets caught nearly 100% of the time and is off the streets for at least a short time and 2) Criminal steals my car (or my friends car, or my parents car), gets away nearly 100% of the time, and is able to steal another car tomorrow. I'd prefer the bait car, thanks.
Prostitution and drug dealing is arguably different. If the law and the police weren't involved, everyone involved would be willing to allow the action (the sale of sex/drugs) to occur. Car theft is different. As the owner of the car, I never want someone to steal my car. There are no sane arguments for why car theft is good. Catching someone who steals cars is good. These people are predators who know that they are breaking the law and know that they are depriving another human being of their physical property.
Law enforcement is supposed to product the law-abiding. Protect them from what? Criminals. Catching the criminals before they steal from the law-abiding seems like effective, pro-active protection to me.
I for one hope police use bait like this in more cases, I know too many people who have had car windows smashed and car stereos stolen. I know too many people who have had apartments broken into.
There are actually two different types of entrapment.
If an undercover cop tells you to do something or he'll blow your head off it's an absolute form of entrapment. This situation is rare, but not unheard of.
But if an undercover cop makes you an offer too good to refuse it's a much more grey area. Many normally law-abiding citizens may be tempted by these offers, and there have been some high profile cases thrown out because the cours ruled that a reasonable person would not be able to resist the bait. E.g., I seem to recall that John DeLorean was acquitted because of this - the pressure to save his company was so great that no reasonable person could avoid the quick money for moving a relatively small amount of drugs.
It's hard to imagine a situation where car theft is irresistable, but it's much harder to make blanket statements about victimless crimes.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
It catches car thieves, but only car thieves. This is one of the few uses of technology that has zero probability of catching "the wrong guy".
I'm now waiting for the first action movie out of Hollywood that features a tough, no-nails cop breaking into an available car to chase an escaping murder suspect, only to be stopped in traffic two minutes later by a different part of the department.
Using bait cars that can be disabled remotely to catch car thieves is nothing new - video from these cars has been on many of the countless police videos shows that were big before the more recent "reality" shows. The new thing is the use of GPS to track the cars, eliminating the need to keep police officers sitting around watching the car. This frees them up for other things while the car thieves still get caught.
What, you think that each thief steals one car and then retires?
What they're doing here makes it less likely that your car will be stolen. If your car is the only one on the street, and someone wants to steal a car, there's a 100% chance that it'll be yours, and some <100% chance that it'll be recovered.
On the other hand, if this trap car is also on the streets, then there's only a 50% chance yours will be selected for theft. And there's a 100% chance the thief will be caught before he comes back to steal your car.
You should be on your knees thanking the Arlington police for this.
(Personally, I don't like it, because I believe that car theft improves urban quality-of-life by driving up the cost of car ownership, but that's neither here nor there for this discussion.)
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
You can do something nearly simliar with your own car if you want to pay the monthly service charges on CDPD or a similar packet data network. Basically grab a CDPD modem that is capable of telemetry. Tie a NEMA capable GPS receiver to it. When you need to know where your car is telnet to the CDPD modem on a particular port and watch the NEMA stream. Heck, redirect it to something like Delorme AAA Map'n'Go and watch your car drive down the road. I imagine it would be a simple exercise to direct the police to your vehicle.
Now, this working as an effective recovery device depends on the car being able to acquire a GPS signal and maintain it, ability to communicate on the CDPD network, and finding out your car is stolen before it is stripped or the battery is disconnected.
It is true that by using this car-bait technique the police will effectively rid the cities of criminals (at least car thieves, but there is no reason this principle could not be used to catch other criminals, such as gamblers and pedophiles). In this way, we achieve the ultimate protection. As one reply said, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Likewise, the best defense is a good offense, and we should nip these kinds of activities in the bud.
I do no longer mind funding for as many of these sneaky cars as is necessary to finally clean up the streets of America. My one request is that they be utilized only in areas which have a surplus of parking, and that they not be driven during rush hours. Traffic affects us all in more ways than one.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
I am all for this type of law enforcement. I think this type of sting operation ought to be cheap enough to manage with centralized administration and small teams. Maybe this will be a decent deterrent, as jail time obviously isn't enough.
Well I certainly think I'm all for this type of law enforcement, but when I begin to contemplate the future of these types of stings, I must admit that it scares me. I saw an example of this type of car used for an arrest on the discovery channel. They had two girls pull over to the side of the road and get out of the car and start yelling at one another about how girl 1 is just going to "leave his car here and he can come pick it up himself".. then she makes a big show of throwing the keys into the car and slamming the door (presumably without locking the doors) and then gets into her friend's car and off they drive. It's important to mention that before they did this big show, an undercover police officer drove around and found someone he thought looked like an individual who would steal a car (he scoped out a potential target) then they did the act directly in front of this person.
Now I agree with the fact that stealing a car is stealing a car, but this seems to me to be quite a bit like monitoring for thought crime. Present a situation to an individual that is not likely to ever happen, then see if that individual is willing to break the law under these special circumstances. It is easy to see them bring it a step further. Lets say they decide to start catching muggers by having a guy walk out into the street and shout "Wow, I can't believe the ATM just let me withdraw $10,000!!!".
Okay I still agree, a mugging is a mugging. Maybe now that they're catching all of the muggers and the car thieves, they decide to start trying to catch people who are willing to traffic drugs. They start going door to door with a small brown package and offer $10,000 to a person if he'll just deliver the small brown package to an address downtown. Suddenly the police are presenting hypothetical situations that could never exist in reality, just to see if people are willing to break the law in these extreme circumstances. Suddenly the police can transform ANYONE into a criminal, just by finding the threshold of risk vs. reward for that individual.
I would think leaving one of these cars in a high crime area and waiting for them to get stolen is a noble thing. But it scares me when they begin to make false senario's and they target people who fit the profile of a car thief. It seems to me that they are creating crime with these hypothetical situations, then arresting people for having the potential to do wrong if an impossible situation were to occur. Leaving a locked car to be stolen is perfectly acceptable, but creating a situation that is too good to be true frightens me..
I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!
Hardly true. To my thinking it doesn't matter if the door was unlocked. When was the last time you went over to some random car and tested the door to see if it was unlocked. I can say I've *never* done that to a car I or someone I was with didn't own. To my way of thinking, you could leave a ferrari, doors open, windows down, keys in the ignition, cash 3 inches deep on the floor and the Hope diamond sitting on the passenger seat and you're *still* a thief if you steal it and it's *still* not entrapment if you do. No one's encouraging you to steal that several million dollar pile of someone else's property. You would have been quite willing to do it on your own. Now if a police officer offered to pay you to steal the car for him, or suggested you should for your own benefit, that's entrapment. If its entirely of your own volition, enjoy the cell.
I had my car stolen from me once. When you work your ass off to pay for and maintain a vehicle, you feel totally violated to have some piece of shit come along and take it from you. My car was everything I owned, everything I had worked toward... then some son of a bitch stole it.
I have no mercy for those assholes.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?